This invention relates generally to a laser-based spectrometer that is used to measure the absorption spectrum and other physical parameters of trace gases and other substances. Specifically, it provides a way to use room-temperature quantum cascade lasers and other pulsed and unstable wavelength laser sources for sensitive absorption measurements. This invention can be used in the field of laser spectroscopy, industrial processing, environmental monitoring, medicine, biophotonics, and related fields and in particular in the mid-infrared range (3 xcexcm to 15 xcexcm) with room-temperature quantum cascade lasers for spectroscopic measurements.
Gaseous, solid, molecular, chemical, or biological substances can be identified and much information about their surrounding environmentxe2x80x94temperature, pressure, neighboring material constituents, completed or ongoing chemical and biological activities, for examplexe2x80x94can be obtained by measuring the optical spectrum of light that the substances emit or absorb. The making of such measurements is spectroscopy, a wide and diverse field with applications in industry, environmental monitoring, process control, research and development, combustion control, forensics, and a variety of other fields. Applied to biological tissues, materials, or molecules, spectroscopy is a component of biophotonics, a rapidly growing field embracing the life sciences and optical measurement technologies. Applied to medicine, spectroscopy is a component of the rapidly growing field of medical photonics.
Absorption spectroscopy, where the amount of light absorbed in a substance is determined at different wavelengths, is one of the most important of the spectroscopic measurements. Absorption measurements using narrowband tunable lasers having a bandwidth narrower than the absorption features of the substance to be measured have become particularly important, as they allow increased sensitivity and can be done with simple apparatus. In particular, they can be carried out without using monochromators or spectrometers that are otherwise required to provide narrowband optical signals or high resolutions. Furthermore, narrowband laser sources provide much more intense concentrations of light in the required measurement bandwidth, greatly increasing the ease of detection and reducing measurement times.
The sensitivity of an absorption measurement is determined by the absorption cross section of the substance to be measured at the measurement wavelength, by the distance the measurement beam travels through the medium containing the substance, and by the ability of the photodetection apparatus to detect small changes in power transmitted through the substance. Absorption cross sections are usually larger at longer wavelengths, so measurement sensitivities can be increased by operating in the mid-infrared wavelength region (3 xcexcm to 15 xcexcm) as opposed to the near-infrared wavelength region (0.8 xcexcm to 3 xcexcm) or the visible wavelength region (0.4 xcexcm to 0.8 xcexcm). For example, moisture can be detected at 2.0 parts per billion (ppb) sensitivity at 5.94 xcexcm, but only 60 ppb sensitivity at 1.39 xcexcm using typical measurement parameters. For some substances, the sensitivities are vastly different. For carbon dioxide, for example, the detection sensitivities are 0.13 ppb at 4.23 xcexcm versus detection sensitivities of 3,000 ppb at 1.96 xcexcm. For carbon monoxide, detection sensitivities are 0.75 ppb at 4.60 xcexcm versus 30,000 ppb at 1.570 xcexcm. These numbers show that measurement sensitivities can be a thousand or even ten thousand times more sensitive at mid-infrared wavelengths. A consequence is that measurements at longer wavelengths can be carried out using much shorter path lengths and lower detection efficiencies provided that appropriate lasers are available. This lowers costs considerably.
The usual method for carrying out a spectroscopic absorption measurement of the concentration of a trace gas or other substance using a laser is outlined in FIG. 1. Light from a semiconductor laser 11 is collimated into a parallel beam using collimator 12 consisting of a telescope and spatial filter. The collimated parallel beam of light propagates to beamsplitter 13 which sends part of the beam through lens 14 to photodetector 15 where it is detected and the resulting photocurrent sent to the electronics processor 16. The remainder of the collimated parallel beam propagates through gas cell 17 containing the gas or other substance to be measured. The gas cell may be a single pass cell where light passes through once, it may be a multi-pass cell where there are reflecting mirrors that reflect the beam back and forth several times, or the gas cell may be simply an area of free space that the beam passes through. After passing through the gas or other substance to be measured, the beam is focused through lens 18 onto photodetector 19 where it is detected and the resulting photocurrent sent to the electronics. FIG. 2 shows a representative absorption spectrum for nitric oxide calculated assuming a concentration of 1 part per billion, a pressure of 0.08 atm, and an absorbing path length of 5000 meters. FIG. 3 show details of the absorption spectrum of FIG. 2.
Spectroscopy, like many other photonics technologies, is moving out of the laboratory and into the workplace. The growth in the number of applications, combined with the advances in photonics achieved in the related field of optical telecommunications, has both increased the market size for spectroscopic devices and has created strong interest in the development of low-cost, small, easy to use, reliable, robust, and sensitive spectroscopic devices. In particular, the commercialization of tunable semiconductor lasers for optical telecommunications applications has lead to the ready availability of low-cost infrared laser sources that, combined with modern optical and electronics design, have the potential to open broad new markets for spectroscopic instruments. Infrared diode lasers offer the possibility of building spectroscopic absorption measurement devices that have increased sensitivity, including the capability to measure trace gas concentrations in the part per billion range; excellent selectivity for a particular substances without interference from other substances, robustness, maintenance-free operation, long laser lifetimes, speed, simple control and data acquisition mechanisms, small, compact designs, and low costs.
Semiconductor laser sources currently in use or under development in the near-infrared include inexpensive high-quality easily-tunable DFB and DBR lasers that operate at room temperature that are ideal for spectroscopic applications. In the mid-infrared where absorption cross sections are large and the potential for sensitive, low-cost devices is the greatest, the choices are lead-salt semiconductor lasers and unipolar quantum well lasers (quantum cascade lasers). However, lead-salt lasers require cryogenic cooling, have narrow tuning ranges, and have mode hops where the operating wavelength changes abruptly. Quantum cascade lasers have excellent properties when cooled to cryogenic temperatures, but operate at room temperature only in a pulsed mode that produces a sequence of pulses where the wavelength changes in time and the pulses vary in average wavelength. This rules out sensitive absorption measurements with lasers operating at room temperature using conventional measurement techniques in the mid-infrared.
Quantum cascade lasers, although not able to operate continuously at room temperature, are otherwise ideal for mid-infrared spectroscopic measurements in general and trace gas measurements in particular. They are fabricated from well-understood materials (for example, indium gallium arsenide and aluminum indium arsenide) and can operate at nearly all wavelengths between 3.5 xcexcm and 24 xcexcm. Single-mode operation with narrow line widths (100 kHz or smaller) is easily possible, and continuous tunability over tens of nanometers is achieved by adjusting drive currents. They are robust, reliable, and have good long-term stability. They have been shown to be capable of generating ultra-short pulses of 3 to 5 picosecond duration at high repetition rates and 50 picosecond pulse widths when gain-switched, opening up opportunities for time-resolved spectroscopy. However, for room-temperature operation, highly desirable if device costs are to be low, they have broadened spectral bandwidths due to thermal chirp and pulse-to-pulse wavelength variation, restricting their use in traditional absorption spectroscopy to a limited number of measurements involving very broad features of certain absorption spectra.
If a laser cannot operate continuously at room temperature, it is typically because heat generation combined with feedback mechanisms causes lasing instabilities that causes additional heat generation that turns the laser off. Pulsed operation, where the laser is turned on for and interval and then turned off for a longer interval, reduces heat generation and halts instabilities and allows room temperature operation. When laser drive currents are turned on and off quickly, as is the case for the gain-switching pulse operation of quantum-cascade lasers, then the laser operates in its turn-on mode only and steady-state narrowband operation is not achieved. Two problems then occur. One is that the laser wavelength changes rapidly as the laser starts to warm up and the lasing mode is established. The other is that the laser does not turn on in the same way for each pulse. The first results in what is called wavelength chirp and the second results in pulse-to-pulse average wavelength variations. Both processes are detrimental to laser spectroscopy as typical measurement processes cannot account for the fast time variation of the wavelength of the pulse, or cannot measure the pulse-to-pulse variation of the laser wavelength. Accordingly, a pulsed laser must be treated as if it were a laser with much broader bandwidth, limiting its use for trace gas measurements and other sensitive spectroscopic measurements.
One way to resolve the problem of pulse-to-pulse wavelength variations or wavelength chirped pulses is to use fast wavelength measuring devices that measure a pulse""s instantaneous wavelength or measure its pulse-to-pulse average wavelength variation. Most commercial wavelength measuring devices are wavelength averaging devices and very slow, taking fractions of a second for a measurement. They are therefore not capable of following internal pulse wavelength variations on a fast time scale or measuring pulse average wavelengths at repetition rates faster than ten repetitions or so per second. Fast wavelength variations can be observed by heterodyne mixing processes where a laser with a fixed wavelength (the local oscillator) is mixed with the signal to be measured on the surface of a photodetector and the difference frequency components are recorded. Or, fast wavelength variations can be measured with a newly invented technique called frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG). This uses a combination of spectroscopic measurement techniques and short pulse autocorrelation processes to characterize the spectral characteristics of short pulses.
If the pulse-to-pulse wavelength variation is known along with the corresponding transmission information in an absorption spectroscopy experiment, or if the instantaneous wavelength information of a chirped pulse is known along with the corresponding transmission information, then measurement accuracies and trace gas measurement sensitivities can be improved. However the mechanisms for fast wavelength measurements described above are unwieldy, require substantial amounts of equipment, introduce considerable complexity into the measurement, increase equipment size, inflate costs, and have other limitations as well. Heterodyne mixing using a local-oscillator laser requires a laser that produces a narrowband continuous signal at or near the wavelength of interest, usually requiring cryogenic cooling at mid-infrared wavelengths. The local oscillator laser and pulsed laser signals mix in the measurement process to produce radio frequency signals at the wavelength difference. This introduces the need to measure the magnitude of the radio frequency signal and limits the range of wavelength differences that can be determined. If frequency-resolved optical gating techniques are used, then considerable complexity and considerable computation power is required, and the ability to follow high repetition rate sources is eliminated.
Another possible way to address the problem of laser pulses with substantial wavelength variation or random pulse-to-pulse wavelength variations is to perform a correlation measurement where a sample of the gas or substance to be measured is compared with the unknown gas or substance. FIG. 4 shows a schematic diagram of the measurement apparatus. Light from a laser or other source 11 is collimated into a beam by a collimator 12 and split into two beams with beamsplitter 13. One beam is transmitted through cell 17 that contains the gas or substance to be measured and focused with lens 18 onto photodetector 19. The other beam is reflected by mirror 20 and transmitted through a second cell 21 containing a known concentration of gas or the sample to be measured and focused through lens 22 onto a second photodetector 23. Photocurrents from each of the photodetectors are subtracted from each other at an electrical subtractor 24 to provide a signal that is a correlation of the absorption spectrum of the unknown sample and the known reference sample. The correlation signal can be used to detect the presence or absence of the substance in the reference cell when the source has a complicated and time varying spectrum of the sort that accompanies a chirped source or pulse-to-pulse variations. However, this method does not provide a method to determine the wavelength characteristics of the laser pulses.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus and method that overcomes many of the foregoing problems. Advantages of the present invention are that it provides a method to measure the average wavelength of the pulses from the laser source on a pulse-by-pulse basis and to combine that information with the measurement of the absorption of the light in the sample to obtain a narrow-band laser absorption measurement. The method makes it possible to use semiconductor lasers with pulsed room temperature operation for sensitive absorption spectroscopy measurement as individual pulses have narrower bandwidths than can be observed and recorded using traditional wavelength measurement means. Our present invention, by using wavelength sensing devices that are capable of very fast operation, also has the advantage that it can follow the wavelength variations of pulses that change in wavelength, thus effectively providing scanned wavelength measurements of features of a samples absorption spectrum.
Other objects and advantages of the present invention are:
a) to provide an apparatus for absorption spectroscopy measurements that can use quantum cascade semiconductor lasers operating at room temperature
b) to provide an apparatus for absorption spectroscopy measurements that is inexpensive
c) to provide an apparatus for absorption spectroscopy measurements that can be readily miniaturized,
d) to provide an apparatus for absorption spectroscopy measurements that can use lasers with naturally occurring wavelength variations
e) to provide an apparatus for absorption spectroscopy measurements that can do correlation spectroscopy measurements using pulsed laser and other lasers with naturally occurring wavelength variations in their output.
The objectives and advantages of the invention are achieved by an optical system that directs a collimated beam of light from a laser source down three predetermined paths, one proceeding through a sampling cell containing a sample medium whose absorption is to be measured followed by a photodetector, the second proceeding to a wavelength sensor capable of very fast operation described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/954,086 incorporated herein in its entirety by reference, and the third proceeding to a monitor photodetector. Light proceeding through the sample cell is detected by a photodetector that provides photocurrents proportional to the light""s intensity, light directed to the wavelength sensor produces a signal corresponding to the light""s wavelength, and light detected by the monitor photodetector produces a photocurrent that is proportional to the intensity of light entering into the sample cell. A divider divides the sampling cell photodetector photocurrent by the monitor photodetector photocurrent to provide a measurement of the absorption of the sample material at the wavelength measured by the wavelength sensor. Varying the wavelength of the light from the laser either by natural or artificial means, an absorption spectrum measurement of the sample over the wavelength variation range can be obtained.
More particularly, the apparatus includes an optical system comprising lenses that collimate the light emerging from the laser source. The system may include a spatial filter to eliminate unwanted light. Two beamsplitters that direct light to a wavelength sensor and the monitor photodetector. A sampling cell that contains the material whose absorption spectrum is to be measured. Lenses couple the collimated light into the wavelength sensor and the photodetectors. The wavelength of the light from the laser source may be varied artificially by changing the laser""s driving currents, its temperature, or by other means, or as is the case for many semiconductor lasers operated in pulsed mode, the wavelength of each pulse may vary naturally on a pulse-by-pulse basis. Absorption measurements obtained by dividing the sample cell photocurrent by the monitor photocurrent are paired with wavelength measurement numbers from the wavelength sensor and stored and processed electronically to build up a measurement of the absorption spectrum over the range of interest. Where the wavelength of the laser source can be artificially varied, the absorption spectrum might be obtained by scanning the wavelength over a suitable range. When a pulsed laser source with pulses that vary in average wavelength on a pulse-by-pulse basis is employed, the absorption spectrum is obtained by waiting for the wavelength range of interest to be covered by natural variations of the laser pulse wavelengths or by a combination of natural and artificial variations.
The electronics system may be comprised of one photodetector preamplifier for each of the photodetectors; electronics for the wavelength sensor, one logarithmic amplifier for each of the photodetected signals; and a difference amplifier for subtracting the two logarithmic signals followed by analog-to-digital converters and digital memory and processors, or by photodetector preamplifiers for each of the photodetectors, analog-to-digital converters for the each of the photodetectors, electronics for the wavelength sensor, and digital memory and processors.